A system of dream analysis has been developed which objectively, reliably, and exhaustively codes dreams, free-associations, and other texts. This system ("Scoring System for Latent Structure," or SSLS) also reliably organizes the scoring of dream and free-association texts so as to operationalize Freud's preferred method of dream interpretation (the translation of dream symbols via the dreamer's own free associations) and Freud's model of dream explanation (the derivation of the manifest dream from a set of underlying "dream-thoughts"). SSLS thus opens new possibilities to objective dream research both in determining dream meanings and in modeling the associative processes by which dream imagery is created. The latter operationalization renders Freud's theory of dream formation as a "cognitive" theory which can be shown to be consistent with models and approaches in cognitive pschology, linguistics, etc., thus also opening new possibilities for bringing inputs from contemporary models of the waking mind to bear on the classical problems of dream psychology. It is proposed here that SSLS be applied to dreams, associations, and waking thought specimens of a normative sample of adults and of several specialized samples (congenitally blind, schizophrenics) in order to address the following issues; (a) the differential nature of mental content and mental operations in different psychophysiologically-assessed states; (b) waking sources and effects of dream content; (c) deep-structural and semantic regularities in dreams within and across nights; (d) why, from a cognitive point of view, dreams are so easily forgotten; (e) the extent to which visual-imaginal representations constrain the nature of dream experience; (f) the nature of thought defects in schizophrenia, the generality of the defects across different psychophysiological states, and possible normal models of such defects.